Realising the Heart Sutra

Retreats evolve, and I’ve been leading ‘Emptiness and the Heart Sutra’ for many years now. I love the Heart Sutra as a chant, a text to study and as an entryway into the wonderful territory of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras. However, I see it primarily as a pointer, a means, for transformative realisation.

Realising the Heart Sutra means awakening to Prajñāpāramitā, which also means awakening from the delusions that underlie our unnecessary, self-caused, suffering.
We’ll approach that realisation by cultivating the three levels of wisdom: First we listen.

The sutra is expressed in concepts and we need to be mentally clear about the liberative import of concepts like emptiness, the five skandhas and the various other Buddhist teachings and categories that are mentioned in the text. Then we bring this understanding into relationship with our immediate experience.

This is the heart of the retreat. Emptiness implies absence of something. What is it that we expect to find in our experience that cannot, in fact, be found? This means really, deeply looking. Then we begin to intuit how emptiness lays bare the assumptions and delusions which bring us suffering.

This leaves us with simply what is, as it is. Living as the stream of becoming yet ‘holding to nothing whatever’ – not even emptiness itself. This is the realisation of Prajñāpāramitā. For us this means to relax, let-go, just be. There is nothing to achieve or adorn our ego with, ‘not even wisdom to attain’.